11/30/2006 @ 4:25PM

SCO Gets TKO'ed

The sky is darkening over SCO Group. The Lindon, Utah, software company, which sued IBM in 2003 over the Linux operating system, has been smacked down again by yet another judge.

SCO
claims IBM
took code from Unix, to which SCO claims to hold some copyrights, and put that code into Linux, which is distributed free.

In June, a magistrate judge tossed out two-thirds of SCO’s allegations, saying SCO hadn’t provided any evidence to support its claims. In a blistering decision, Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells of the United States District Court in Utah likened SCO to a store owner accusing someone of shoplifting but failing to say what items had been stolen.

This week, SCO’s appeal of the Wells ruling was tossed out in a harshly worded decision, which Judge Dale Kimball wrote “should come as no surprise to SCO.”

In other words: Stop horsing around. You know you had no reason to appeal.

The judges seem to be growing frustrated with SCO. For years, the company has gone around making outlandish claims–including many to Forbes–about IBM stealing huge amounts of code from Unix. Yet SCO has never shown any evidence to back up its claims.

The ruling is fantastic news for companies like IBM,
Novell
,
Red Hat
and
Hewlett-Packard
, which have built booming businesses around Linux. It’s also good news for thousands of companies worldwide, including Web titans
Google
and
Amazon
, that use Linux in their data centers.

Fans of Linux, who hate SCO for trying to squeeze money out of IBM and for casting a cloud over Linux in the marketplace, celebrated the new ruling. “What does it mean? It means SCO is toast,” wrote “PJ,” the anonymous author of the Groklaw blog, which has argued since the beginning that SCO’s claims lack merit.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, also has said from the start that SCO has no case. “There really is a reason why nobody believes a word SCO is saying, and it’s because SCO is lying,” he said via e-mail earlier this week.

A SCO spokesman declined to comment. An IBM spokesman said, “We prefer to let the judge’s ruling speak for itself.”

In his latest ruling, Judge Kimball also set a new time table for the SCO v. IBM trial. Before SCO v. IBM is heard, the court will try a separate case, SCO v. Novell. At stake in that case is whether SCO even owns the copyrights it claims IBM has infringed upon. Novell argues that it owns the copyrights to Unix, and that SCO does not.

If SCO loses its case against Novell, its case against IBM may fall apart completely.

The Novell case is scheduled for trial in September 2007. That means an SCO v. IBM trial, should one ever occur, probably won’t happen until 2008.